A suicide bomber outside Stade de France, shootings in restaurants, a massacre at a concert venue. The attackers are said to have roared Allahu Akbar.
The light of dawn is thin, grey, and it intensifies only slowly. Me and Sam stand there sharing a cig on the balcony. I wish that I could tell her about Grim, but I can’t.
The day continues with news from Paris: eyewitness reports of those lost, given by those who survived by the skin of their teeth. The perpetrators were Islamist terrorists, and for now they are still at large. They are being hunted by thousands of French police, a hunt that dominates the world’s media while the internet is flooded with fear and panic. As if the sheer horror and grief, the violence and the blood and the fire were not enough.
An act of this nature, just a few hours from Sweden, at a time when refugees, many undocumented, are pouring into the country completely unchecked … The people at the Security Police and the Intelligence Units must have their hearts in their mouths.
27
The Monday Meeting is always the worst. All the weekend’s shitty events need to be condensed and served up, along with simultaneous attempts to create potential plans of action for the week ahead. Today, there’s an elephant in the room that makes it all even more unbearable.
The elephant takes the form of a rumour, seeping down the corridors throughout the morning:
A terrorist suspect may be in Sweden.
He — it is a man — is planning to commit terrorist attacks on Swedish soil. This is the rumour. The Security Police, SEPO, have not yet made the threat public, seemingly keen to avoid hosting a press conference until the government forces them to do so.
The rumour is a bad one, because it’s so vague. Good rumours, the ones that gain traction, often have specific details that make them more ominous: a place, a name, a method. These are missing today, but in spite of that fact the angst overwhelms everything else.
Less than three days since the Paris attacks. Everyone is in shock.
Everyone is deployed onto the streets or glued to their computers, under orders to exploit every last contact they might have.
Find him. Arrest him. Neutralise him.
‘They have asked me to put all of my employees at their disposal, for the purposes of monitoring Stockholm’s Muslim communities,’ Morovi tells us as we sit down in her office. ‘Everyone is panicking. Even the police are checking over their shoulders out on the streets.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve put others on that job, but you cannot continue working on the Reyes case. I just want to know what I’ve put resources into this past week. How did it go?’
That’s why we’re here. I look at Birck, who looks at me.
‘It’s going,’ he says.
‘We’re examining a number of technical exhibits,’ I continue, explaining about the memory stick and my meeting with Miranda Shali after Friday’s training course.
‘I told you that course would be useful to you, Leo,’ she says.
‘It probably won’t give us anything,’ Birck points out. ‘But we’re not going to find out for a few weeks, I’m afraid. We’re not exactly top priority.’
‘If you don’t have anything more to tell me when you get the results of Shali’s analysis, then you’ll have to shelve it. We don’t have time for this.’ She stands up and signals to me and Birck that we should be going. ‘I’ve got a meeting to go to. I don’t fucking do much else these days. In the meantime,’ she says in conclusion, while chucking us a pile of newly arrived complaints, ‘take your pick, but try and make it something we can clear up, for once. And be ready to get out on the streets if it kicks off.’
Birck grimaces.
‘That’s just a rumour.’
‘For now,’ she says.
December is getting closer. People go mad at Christmas time, they say, and the reports we’ve been handed reflect that, despite it still being over a month to go. Eight cases of threatening behaviour, six of bodily harm of which one is grievous, two of attempted manslaughter, and five robberies — the yield of a single city night.
Birck and I sit down with the assault cases and spend the rest of the day working on them. In police work, real drudgery: checking databases, preliminary interviews, debriefings with the officers present at the scene, and conversations with burnt-out prosecutors. I’d much rather be conducting a few crafty background checks on Ludwig Sarac.
Maybe Sarac has some relationship to the man in the falsely plated Audi that we saw on the tape from Västmannagatan on the second of November. Maybe not, but I don’t trust Sarac.
Around half-five in the evening I leave HQ. The headlines on the newsstands are all about Paris. A light drizzle is falling, the kind that soaks you through, getting inside your clothes and making you shiver. On the streets and at bus stops, people are nervously aware of their surroundings, keeping their distance from one another.
These are strange times and I don’t blame them, people, not anymore.
28
Police, police, everywhere you look, police. All paranoid, all alert.
He almost got caught, he explains, as he came round the corner onto Tjärhovsgatan and walked straight into two uniformed officers who’d been stationed in the vicinity of the mosque.
‘And how are you then?’
One of them patted Grim on the shoulder.
‘Good.’
The other, a woman, studied him carefully.
Grim apologised, convinced that the game was up, certain that they were about to ID him and arrest him on the spot. He could see the walls of the remand cell in front of him.
They didn’t, though. They stared intently at him for a few seconds, then nodded and turned away. He hurried on, but he could feel their eyes on his back all the way down the street.
‘I can’t take much more of this.’
‘It’ll calm down,’ I say. ‘It’ll blow over.’
‘Terror doesn’t blow over that easily.’ He pulls out one of the desk drawers and retrieves a crumpled little envelope. ‘Anyway, I found this.’
Inside the envelope is an assortment of identity documents, every bit as fake as they’re convincing, in the name of a Patricia Cruz. I check the pictures to reassure myself that it really is her, and note the dates. A serious-looking Angelica is staring straight down the lens.
‘I mean, if you have any doubts that I’m telling the truth.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Gabriel does though.’
‘He can speak for himself when he gets here, but quite honestly, what did you expect?’
Grim doesn’t answer. He runs his hand through his hair, flattens out a crease in his trousers, and checks where he’s got his phone.
‘You do know that she was in love with you, right?’ I say.
‘Angelica?’
‘Yes. When she was about twelve or something, after we’d helped her at the bus stop.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘A friend of hers said so. You must’ve made a big impression.’
‘I don’t think I had anything to do with that. A seventeen-year-old guy tends to make a big impression on little girls.’
‘But still.’
Grim smiles.
‘Yeah, maybe.’
The sight of his smile stirs a memory, sudden and colourful, and in my head I’m in another time. It’s been a long summer, and me and Grim are alone, walking back from the youth centre. Thunder is brewing in the distance and the air is oppressively muggy. Yes, there he is, I can see him in my mind’s eye now, my friend with the untameable blond hair and the arch smile, the nimble fingers and the countless Leo, have ever you thought about … The billowing laugh, the seriousness in his face. We’re sixteen and seventeen, and walking home through Salem late at night. It feels like heaven is a long way off.
We talk about people we know: she’s done th
is and that, and he got hauled in but the other guy got off, while a third guy called Dani or Danny — No, Grim, seriously, I know that that’s his name, Masha said he was there, but I don’t know if he spells his name with an ‘i’ or a ‘y’ — had been on lookout but hadn’t dared to actually do anything. How chaos will reign when school starts again; two gangs have been at war since back in July and it simply can’t end well. How one of the boys about to start the third grade had apparently been selling smuggled beer from his locker in the corridor next to ours; he still had loads left at the end of term, and he’s worried that the beer will have been destroyed over the summer, and worried that he might have to change locker when he starts the new year — which would mean not only losing his business but being exposed.
We laugh. The sky flickers, releases an angry bolt of lightning. The thunder gathers. Side by side, we walk though Salem on one of its narrow pavements, and every now and then the outside of my right hand brushes against Grim’s left.
And now, in this room, all these years later, when I stare at my hand I can see the tiny hairs standing on end at the memory.
‘I am so incredibly tired,’ Grim says, more to himself than to me. ‘Of being on the run, of being alone. I’ve got time left to serve, a ruling based on my psychological condition. But if I’m okay in those terms, let’s say the original sentence was incorrect and I should in fact have been sentenced to jail … then what do I do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you want me banged up?’
That’s a crucial question. I think I do. No, no I don’t. I don’t know.
I stand up from the mattress, head over to the table, and examine the ID cards that never made it to Angelica.
‘How many were there, altogether? People you arranged new identities for?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’ve never asked you before.’
He thinks about it.
‘About a hundred, maybe. After a while, I stopped counting. But not all were successes, some were too tricky. For most of them, though, this sort of thing was enough,’ he says with a nod towards the documents on the table. ‘Sorting out a new passport, credit cards, things like that. But for others it took more. You had to go in and excise them from records to successfully make them disappear. That takes either friends in the right places, or a long, long time. Let’s say I managed it with about eighty of them. About a dozen fucked it up and got caught because they didn’t follow my instructions.’
‘So seventy, give or take. Seventy people who’ve committed serious crimes and yet are still at large thanks to you.’
‘You mean that I ought to have a guilty conscience?’
‘It almost sounded that way just now.’
‘You mean that I should be banged up.’
‘I wonder what your thoughts are on the subject.’
‘Most of them would’ve ended up inside, or in treatment, if they’d lived that long. Presumably a good number would’ve died as a result of suicide, violence, or an overdose. Either way, they wouldn’t have benefited society in any way. On the contrary, they would’ve cost astronomical sums.
This makes me laugh out loud.
‘I ask you about your conscience, and you reply in monetary terms.’
‘How do you want me to answer then?’
‘I was thinking along the lines of justice and the trauma experienced by their victims, and their victim’s relatives. If you care about them at all, that is?’
‘Justice?’ Grim’s eyes darken. ‘What do you know about justice? And what kind of a question is that? Whether I care about these people’s victims? What do you think? Don’t try and make this about you being a better person than I am.’
‘I care about what I do, at least, and that my actions have consequences for other people.’
‘Do you? Have you told Sam about me, about us? What we’re up to here?’
Him mentioning her name stops me in my tracks.
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘It so is. Of course I care about the consequences of my actions. But what was I supposed to do? I needed to survive. Everyone needs to survive. However much you might think you care about justice and morality, you’ll abandon it, put it to one side, if your own freedom is at stake.’
‘You were the one who said you were in debt,’ I say. ‘It was you who started talking about serving your time. I infer that you’ve started to reconsider what you’ve done.’
Grim says nothing for a long time. I look at my hand again. The hairs lie flat, the memory gone.
‘You haven’t found a list then?’
‘Eh?’
‘A list, I asked for that before. Of her clients.’
‘No.’
‘And no other lists either?’
‘Lists of what? And what’s that got to do with this?’
‘Nothing,’ Grim says. ‘Nothing, I just thought it might help.’
There’s a knock at the door.
29
Birck closes the door behind him and inspects his surroundings.
‘Cosy.’
Grim looks up a number on his phone, dials, and waits.
‘It’s me. You can come up. Good.’ The call ends. ‘He’s close by.’
Birck walks over to me with Angelica’s ID cards in his hand, studying them carefully.
‘Fucking hell,’ he says, and Grim turns his head.
‘What?’
‘These are good.’
A list. That’s the second time Grim has asked me about a list. There’s something he’s not telling me.
The door is opened by a bony little sparrow of a man with short dark hair, a sharp beak, deep-set eyes, and thin lips. A few years older than me, he’s wearing a worn-out trench coat that reaches down to his knees, and black jeans.
Ludwig Sarac — once part of the pride of Stockholm’s police force, the painfully efficient communications division — has a jerky stare and beads of sweat glistening on his top lip.
‘I’m whizzing my tits off, to tell you the truth,’ he says. ‘I had to take way too much just so that I’d dare to come out at all. Fucking bizzies everywhere.’
How he’s still alive is a mystery to everyone, given that he’s stayed in Stockholm. Two major syndicates have announced a reward for anyone who can bring them Ludwig Sarac, or parts of him in a bag.
‘Even in here,’ I say.
Ludwig goes stiff and his eyes bore into mine.
‘Leo Junker,’ he says.
‘And this is my colleague, Gabriel.’
‘Don’t fuck me around, Junker. I’m wired. Makes me unpredictable.’
‘At least you’re aware,’ Birck says as he retrieves a stiff piece of paper from his blazer pocket and unfolds it. ‘That’s good. Self-insight, sort of thing.’
Ludwig sniggers. He unbuttons his coat and looks at Grim.
‘Hardly recognise you these days.’
Grim gives him a hug. I observe them closely, and note that the embrace lasts for a second, maybe two, too long. They’d be able to say something, pass each other a message or instructions. I don’t know.
‘This man,’ Birck says, holding up a series of printed frames of the man from the Västmannagatan surveillance footage. ‘Do you recognise him?’
The images are all grainy, with digitally enhanced light and focus, to make his features more visible. He leaves the car, crosses the road, opens the main door. It’s not a lot of material, but it’s what we’ve got.
‘I recognise him.’
Ludwig takes the printout and examines the images. His nails are filthy.
‘Right?’ says Birck. ‘You’re saying that you recognise him. What can you tell us about him?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
Birck gets the pap
er back and returns it to his blazer.
‘I live in the back of beyond, to tell you the truth. I don’t go out. I don’t have much to do, don’t have the necessary resources, if you know what I mean.’
‘You’re asking for money?’
Ludwig smiles.
‘You’ve obviously got the money for drugs,’ I say.
‘I haven’t paid for them yet.’
‘They can’t buy your information, Ludwig,’ says Grim.
‘Is this the man who visited you about a week ago, asking about our mutual acquaintance here?’ Birck perseveres.
Ludwig takes off his coat and sits down on the mattress, all of us closely watching his every move.
‘Yes. That was him.’
‘What can you tell us about him?’ I say.
‘To be perfectly honest with you, I already have.’
‘Be perfectly honest,’ Grim repeats. ‘You like that phrase, I remember now.’ He takes a step towards Ludwig. ‘I don’t think you are perfectly honest. I’m fairly sure you know more about him than you let on to me, and I think you kept it to yourself because you know that information has a monetary value.’
‘Well yes,’ Ludwig laughs. ‘Yes, I do know exactly who he is. The question is how much you’re prepared to pay to find out.’
‘I get it,’ Grim says, scowling down at the little man. ‘You lied to me.’
Then he jumps on him.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Lotta, or Jorge. You were the one who contacted him. What do they think I know? Who are they?’
‘I don’t know.’
Birck moves his hand to the holster under his arm, then slowly closes his hand around the P226’s handle, holds there.
‘Stop lying to me!’ Grim roars. ‘I hate it when people lie to me.’
Birck puts his free hand on Grim’s shoulder.
‘John. Calm down.’
To my great surprise, Grim lets go of the little man and stands up. Birck steers him backwards, gently.
‘It’s funny, someone who’s told so many lies having such an aversion to liars.’
The Thin Blue Line Page 10